Article on Chinese codes and ciphers

This paper is the first scholarly
attempt to examine the history of Chinese cryptography and the role it played
in building the intelligence network of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)
from 1927 to 1949. Rather than investigating the institutional structure of
intelligence, I focus on Chinese characters, the primary medium that made
cryptology and intelligence possible. Given that the Chinese writing system is
by nature nonalphabetic and thus noncipherable, how did cryptography work in
Chinese? How did the state and its scientists reengineer Chinese characters for
the purposes of secret communication? This paper argues that due to the Chinese
writing system itself, Chinese cryptography was bound to the use of codebooks
rather than ciphers; thus, “codebook management” was central to building
intelligence networks in China.